The Premise:
Success in all business today requires access to accurate information, accessible when you actually need it. Looking around the African continent, we see a dire need for access to more meaningful, relevant, and accurate information everywhere. And though many times forgotten, this is especially true in agriculture. Farmers often lack comparative information on commodity prices across markets to negotiate for better prices for their products. Traders and businesses need an effective way to track their stock and inventory in real-time. Governments, NGOs and projects need a better, cheaper and more effective way of reaching out to people with information. This is where Esoko comes in.


Enter Esoko:
Esoko is a powerful set of web and SMS tools that any business, project, government or individual can use to exchange information with members, suppliers or clients in the field. It’s quick, we try to make it easy, and incorporating SMS gives users access to relevant market information more efficiently and affordably than ever before. Through these new technologies, Esoko is empowering people with information and attempting to transform the way agricultural markets work across the continent.

Esoko users can choose from a range of applications to suit their needs, including automatic SMS Alerts, (prices and offers delivered to mobile phones), bulk SMS for advisories and procurement, SMS Polling to track field data/activities and stock counts to track inventory/volumes. The platform itself revolves around the idea of market networks, in an attempt to reflect the real marketplace. These networks can be associations, businesses, informal groups, or regional projects. Once the groups are set up, they cut across the entire application and provide and easy way to work and share information with fellow members.

This app is an interface to the Esoko platform, so everyone from traders to extension officers to data collectors to managers can use it. It allows users to connect to and manage their networks, pull information like commodity prices, offers and news from the platform, and easily share that market information via SMS messages with other users. Esoko’s Android does all of this, all the while seamlessly syncing with the main platform. Through it’s Android application, Esoko is not only harnessing the technical versatility and power of Android, but also the fast growing mobile industry, where Android has just begun taking the market by storm.